Follow by Email

Monday, 2 June 2014

A Short Reflection on a Shavuot Paradox

Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli-born Nobel prizewinning
psychologist, is the author of Thinking,
Fast and Slow (2011), a book which challenges our innate belief that it is
our rational or logical thinking that is determining our everyday decision
making. Actually, as Kahneman shows in impressive and compelling detail, the "secret author of many of the
choices and judgments” we makeis
ourintuitive, associative,
metaphorical, impressionistic, selves – a part of the brain that can’t be
‘switched off’.

In a famous
experiment he conducted in New York (in the days before mobile phones) an
accident was staged – someone dropped all her papers on the pavement – outside
of a phone booth in which someone was making a call. Sometimes a single coin, a
dime, (enough to make the call), had been left in the booth; and sometimes not.
If there was no dime in the phone booth, only 4% of the exiting callers helped
to pick up the papers. If there was a dime, no fewer than 88% helped.

Our ‘innate’
generosity, our capacity for caring for others, is not hard-wired into us. It
is not even a constant in us. It comes and goes. It depends on our feeling-mood
at the time. And, as we know, our feeling-moods go up and down, change all the
time. This raises a large question, both psychological and spiritual: can we
educate ourselves, train ourselves, to be more consistently generous, more
compassionate, more considerate – i.e. not so much unconsciously at the mercy
of our everyday feeling states?

Judaism offers us
Torah – teachings for life, a moral/ethical vision of how to be as a people. On
this fleeting summer festival we call Shavuot
(Pentecost, we celebrate this. We don’t
have to make up everything anew – we are inheritors of guidelines, directions, provocations
towards reflection and action.

But this mythopoeic
vision rests on the assumption that we
are totally free to consciously choose our behaviour; that following the ways-of-being,
teachings and vision laid down at Sinai, or by the rabbis of the past, rests on
free-will decisions we make moment by moment, season after season. But what
Kahneman has taught us is that this assumption is deeply flawed. The “ secret
author”/authority within us is writing us a subversive script that might well
be at odds with our conscious wishes and intentions. So where does that leave ‘Israel’,
as a people? And ourselves as individual Jews?

Maybe the rabbis
of old intuited that things were more complex than they seemed. For, basing themselves
on the Biblical narrative that shows how the patriarch Jacob’s name was changed
over the course of his life to Israel, they suggested that this represents a
struggle inside each human being: the struggle - that lasts a lifetime - for
the ‘trickster’, the ‘heel’ in us (the root meaning of the name Ya’akov/Jacob), to be transmuted into some
more refined aspect of our selves, Yisrael/Israel.
Though even that name – to our glory – retains a reminder (the word can be
understood as ‘the one who struggles with the divine’) that the struggle to
live out the best part of ourselves is never completed. It is part of our
essence.

Something to
ponder as Shavuot flashes past us almost before we have time to reflect on the unsettling
paradox of the human heart at the festival’s own heart.